Adultery and betrayal, ‘70s style

For extramarital lovers, the characters in John Curran’s “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” spend a lot of time talking about their spouses. Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Edith (Naomi Watts) are cheating on Terry (Laura Dern) and Hank (Peter Krause), respectively. Jack and Hank and Edith and Terry are best friends, but that value-added anti-adultery incentive seems wasted on them. Jack and Edith pass the time between woodland bonks idly wondering whether Hank and Terry will sleep together too. Of course they will.

The betrayal cuts more ways than a Swiss Army knife, and it’s far from the my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me stuff of cliche. Jack and Edith are not really interested in Tolstoyan generalizations about unhappy families -- Jack’s job teaching literature at a small college and his affinity for the deathbed existentialism of Ivan Ilyich notwithstanding. Their adulterous arrangement is cozy, intimate and useful. It helps them locate the exact whereabouts of their other halves’ buttons, the better to press them all at once later like 3-year-olds hijacking elevators. Terry, for one, is going down.

Screenwriter Larry Gross based the script for “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” on two novellas written in the mid-’70s by the late Andre Dubus. The film is set in the present, but Gross first wrote it 23 years ago, before Todd Field’s “In the Bedroom” made hot properties out of Dubus stories. Despite updates, it shows its age. Sure, the characters drink whiskey out of Svepa glasses -- or are they Rattviks? -- instead of jelly jars, but who really drinks whiskey at the kitchen table anymore? Hank throws his novel, which has been gathering rejections all summer, on the backyard grill, but the gesture doesn’t pack the punch it would have back in 1975. To get the same effect in 2004, he’d have had to bludgeon his Mac.

“We Don’t Live Here Anymore” dismantles the two marriages as if pulling them piece by piece from a picnic basket, and at times the deliberate symmetry gets to be a bit too much. Pacing between Jack and Terry’s house, a federal disaster area festooned with stray cat turds, and Hank and Edith’s, a wishful IKEA display, the movie pores over the couples’ hermetic lives (do writers still move to small college towns and teach in order to write about writers living in small college towns and teaching?) as if challenging us to pick a paradigm: chaotic but vital, or chillingly polite.

Personally, I can’t think of any contemporary marriages quite like these two. The particular state of connubial despair depicted feels like a sociological relic, in part thanks to the discordant note struck by the sight of a fiction writer and a lit professor single-handedly supporting families in large Craftsman houses, while their wives’ careers, or dreams of careers, are not even mentioned. On the historical timeline of conjugal discord, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” would be wedged somewhere between the sexual revolution and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Still, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” is affecting and sincere in the best sense, which makes up for the whiff of anachronism and the creakiness of some of the big metaphoric moments.

With her intense, close-set eyes and her mad insect postures, Dern flails all over the screen as her Terry tries to squeeze a confession from Jack, who has ill-advisedly taken a summer off only to find that idleness disagrees with him. (Oddly, her relationship with Edith seems unaffected.) The more she tries, the more he baits and pokes her mercilessly, angling for a more equal distribution of guilt by driving Terry into the arms of his best friend.

As the only character whose inner voice we occasionally hear, Jack gets to flaunt his conscience, even if he rarely listens to it. Ruffalo’s performance is weightier here than in past films; he’s less likely to squirm and squint under scrutiny. Jack absorbs Terry’s constant recriminations with an almost Zen-like aplomb -- what doesn’t kill him makes him meaner. His miasmic torment bubbles up to the surface, setting him apart from the cold, unperturbable Hank. Jack quashes Terry’s every attempt to establish communication, until she’s so weak that the slightest task overwhelms her.

The nihilist of the group, Edith is engaged in a zero-sum game of petty, knee-jerk retaliation against her husband. Watts plays her as a woman whose prettiness and constant domestic prettifying mask a seething, frighteningly controlled anger. She’s capable of some highly strategic cruelty. In a motel room one afternoon, she tells Jack about a trip she and her daughter, the fabulously dour Sharon (Jennifer Bishop), took to the zoo, where they watched a gorilla make a Tootsie Pop of his own excrement. “He looked so human.... It was as if he knew how trapped he was,” Edith says, then segues to the subject of Jack’s marriage to Terry. “Do you know how sad it is watching you guys?”

It is sad, but it’s nice to see a movie that tries on grown-up themes and doesn’t reduce them to a tagline. Gross and producer Jonas Goodman, whose father was Dubus’ editor, did well in giving this charged material to director Curran, whose first feature was the well-received 1998 relationship drama “Praise.” His mellifluous direction softens some of the more difficult material. In one sequence, Sharon watches astronauts on TV. Later, as the adults have sex with their respective spouses, terse, staticky radio transmission echoes in the background.

Emotionally, the characters are groping in the dark, but none more than the slick, detached Hank. Krause’s portrayal of a self-absorbed writer is subtle and unnerving. When Jack stamps out his cigarette like he’s putting out a fire, then tells Hank, “They’re pissing me off. They’re trying to kill me,” Hank replies, “Cigarettes don’t have souls. They don’t mean you any harm.” It’s a neat logic trick from a guy who has brought considerable talents to bear on evading all responsibility. Hank believes himself to be as soulful as a Marlboro Light, and therefore blameless. He’s wrong, of course. Things don’t have to be intentional to inflict pain, and harm is hard to contain once it’s been released. By now, everyone knows secondhand smoke kills.

*

‘We Don’t Live Here Anymore’

MPAA rating: R

Times guidelines: Alfresco sex, profanity, violence against glassware

Mark Ruffalo...Jack Linden

Laura Dern...Terry Linden

Peter Krause...Hank Evans

Naomi Watts...Edith Evans

Jennifer Bishop...Sharon Evans

Warner Independent Pictures presents a Front Street production, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Director John Curran. Producers Harvey Kahn, Jonas Goodman and Naomi Watts. Executive producers Larry Gross, Mark Ruffalo and Ruth Epstein. Screenplay by Larry Gross, based on the novellas “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Adultery” by Andre Dubus. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti. Editor Alexandre de Franceschi. Costume designer Katia Stano. Music Michael Convertino. Music Supervisor Laurie Parker. Production designer Tony Devenyi. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.